Another list member asked me privately:
>Where do they come from, anyway?
The vast majority come from AOL. We have a number of active and
intelligent members who use AOL, but by its mass-market nature, AOL
attracts many newbies, and its membership is beginning to reflect
the general population. At one time, the Net could handle these
influxes, which occurred each fall semester. The small number of
newcomers to old-hands meant that there were plenty of experienced
people who could advise and help the newcomers, but in the last
year or two, the veritable flood of inexperienced users (due primarily
to AOL but also CompuServe and flat-rate/unlimited use ISPs) has
been overwhelming and has severely damaged the signal-to-noise ratio
of both Usenet and even some mailing lists.
I urge you all to not severely flame such people. Other than your
own pointer on how to unsubscribe, it is probably best for you to
simply ignore them. I ascribe to the philosophy that it is better
to teach a man to fish than give him a fish, so I will continue to
tell such people how they can unsubscribe themselves from the list.
I will also gradually add additional software safeguards to weed
out such users and messages (digests, confirms, probes, and so on).
Please don't let such childish outbursts from a tiny minority spoil
your enjoyment of mil-veh discussions.
--Arthur